#ThingsThatTakeLongerThan6Weeks

Yesterday afternoon, as we three Ms. magazine interns took a break from fact-checking some amazing stories for the summer 2013 issue, we noticed a little article about three Texas legislators filing a bill, H.B. 59, that would make abortion illegal after just six weeks of pregnancy, and would require women seeking abortions to have invasive transvaginal ultrasounds. Given that Ms. has been avidly following the Texas anti-choice legislation saga, we were outraged.

In six weeks, a woman may not even know she is pregnant–let alone be forced to make a choice that, by U.S. law, she is given about 24 weeks to make. So, I and my co-interns Danielle Nelson and Natasha Turner decided to create the Twitter hashtag #ThingsThatTakeLongerThanSixWeeks to point out how little time six weeks is. At first, we posted silly things such as:

But then, people started noticing and posting their own ideas to protest H.B. 59 and the War on Women being waged in Texas and nationally.

When we woke up this morning, we saw that both Feministing and Salon.com were covering the hashtag we started. While we thought that it would just be an inside joke among Ms. interns, we are thrilled that it has reached a wider audience and that people are continuing to protest the dismissive way that the Texas GOP is treating women and their right to choose.

Please, do come over to Twitter and weigh in what you think takes longer than six weeks!